


Bright Lights Over Piraeth

by trivialFabricant



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-18
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 13:51:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1650920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trivialFabricant/pseuds/trivialFabricant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The panoptic gaze of Anaander Mianaai, Lord of the Radch, falls on the core worlds and backwaters like Piraeth alike, but treachery can still surface anywhere. A one-shot set loosely on the edge of canon, before the events of and with mild spoilers for Ancillary Justice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bright Lights Over Piraeth

**Author's Note:**

> From the moment I realised what was going on with the character in Ancillary Justice, I knew I'd have to write something about Anaander Mianaai. Here's my first effort - may you find her as fascinating as I do!

Anaander Mianaai had a migraine. That is to say, Anaander Mianaai, trying not to yawn through an interminable meeting with the commander of Piraeth station, had a migraine; while Anaander Mianaai, piloting a shuttle through a gas cloud, had a stabbing pain behind one eye; while Anaander Mianaai, sitting down to a ritual dinner with the leaders of several prominent families, felt her appetite slide away as the food began to pile up in front of her. You didn't know what a headache was until a thousand of your heads were all aching at once.

Migraines were one of the things she'd never been able to debug. Each body responded differently, the symptoms coming on in a staggered, irregular pattern. And once it had started, it spread through the network like bad luck, each body's symptoms triggering the next in a cloud of pain expanding at the speed of light. At best, she could go back and look through the timestamps. Last time she'd tried that she was able to narrow the trigger down to a rough sphere approximately five hundred billion kilometres across. 

In a cramped office in a large metal tube orbiting Piraeth, Anaander Mianaai realised she was rubbing her face.

"Are you alright, my lord?" asked the station commander, showing a surprising turn of empathy for someone who had just put Mianaai through over an hour of charts and statistics.

What was her name? One of the Loranders, she knew, but they all had that same look to them. She checked her nearby minds to see if she had it. Yeoth, one of her suggested, looking up from a book. The great-granddaughter. The answer came with a sharp jab right behind her implant, making her wince. Sometimes when one of these came on, she felt that if she could tear out the damnable thing, claw out the flesh behind it, it would stop hurting. She supposed that would work - after a fashion.

"Quite alright," she said curtly, forcing her hand back down to the table. "Now, explain that five percent energy shortfall."

~

"Well? Did you get anything?" Dorca leaned over her friend's shoulder to try to get a look at the screen.

Tessarn batted her away. "You're in the light," she complained.

Tessarn was doing something with one of the station portables, designed for use outside of the communications grid, or during solar activity outside the hull. "C'mon, Tess," said Dorca. "Anything?"

Tessarn poked a few more buttons. "Maybe," she said. "We should have flashed the lights slower. It's hard to filter it out."

"Any slower and she'd have seen it," said Dorca. "Aatr's tits, Station would have seen it. Lights aren't meant to flicker like that. It was hard enough to smooth out the power draw as it was."

"Yeah, yeah. It's just - how often does she visit? Every two months? If we don't get it this time... how long can we wait?" Tessarn turned to look at Dorca. "I know you said there's a hole in the grid here, but I heard Yoeth say the other day they were going to redevelop the docks, add some capacity. And if we can't work here..."

"Doesn't matter," said Dorca, her mouth a line. "If she knows we're working on this - she'll change every code she has. And she'll have Station flush us out of an airlock before you can say treason. Go on. What have we got?"

"Ok." Tessarn angled the portable so Dorca could see it. In the centre of the screen there was an animated plot of lines in tens of different colours, looping around the same sequence. "The black line is the stimulus."

"The flicker."

"Which we have timed to the picosecond, thanks to your little box."

Dorca grinned, and tossed something with a dangling cable in one hand, easily catching it.

"The other lines are the relevant telemetry. It's not all of it - just what seem to be the closest correlations."

"It's definitely the telemetry, then?" asked Dorca. "I know we thought--"

"Yeah. Unless she's transmitting via a completely unknown medium, she's using just the same tele channels as everyone else. It's encrypted, of course--"

"But if we know what's going in, and what comes out, we've got a chance at cracking it. Right." Dorca peered at the lines, narrowing her eyes. "That one. The cyan. What is it?"

"Yep. That's what I thought too. It's a composite feature, but you can see how it tracks. The light goes on, the blue line goes up. The light goes off..."

Tessarn fell silent, and for a change, Dorca didn't butt in. They just looked at each other. It was Tessarn who eventually spoke again.

"Dee, I think we just hacked the Lord of the Radch."

~

Well, that was a waste of time, thought Anaander Mianaai to herselves. It usually was, of course, but you had to keep the provinces on their toes. Otherwise you had problems. Inefficiency crept in. They needed to know you were always watching. Yeoth had blustered her way through an explanation while Mianaai tried to keep the boredom off her face, and had eventually stiffly marched her back to the docks. You had to smile, sometimes. They got so formal.

The Sword of Aseenu was in-system, and had some comfortable berths, but comfort was easy to come by; for Anaander Mianaai, luxury meant occasionally allowing herself to pilot her own shuttle. Piraeth station was geo-stable and an easy hop down to the gate on the planet. If she let others do everything for her, her own skills would go to waste. And if there was one thing Anaander Mianaai knew, it was that sometimes you had to be able to do something yourself.

She put a hand on her shoulder, and took her own place at the pilot's console. This body still had a migraine, but at least it could see straight. At the back of the shuttle, she sat back and gingerly closed her eyelids, pink lights flashing behind them. On the front seat, she took another painkiller and washed it down with flat, recycled water. Oh, the joys of slumming it. In her hand, the yoke responded easily, the shuttle rising and falling with a touch.

She was coming down on the night side of Piraeth. The sun never really set on the Radch, of course, not even on a regional basis; the surface was dotted with artificial light, and even if she hadn't been able to clearly make out the spaceport approach, the shuttle knew exactly where it was going, and would be taking her there automatically if she didn't insist on overriding the autopilot. But there was something comforting in the patches of blackness that clung between the hills, soft at the edges, so different to the hard shadows of space.

She was resting her eyes on one such pool of blissful dark when everything blazed suddenly white. Both of her shot bolt upright. Her first thought was that somebody had detonated a nuclear weapon. Her second was, shit, my head. As the light waxed unbelievably brighter still, she didn't have time for a third.

~

"What the fuck, Dee?!"

Dishevelled, still slightly fuzzy at the edges, Tessarn rested her weight on one of the bare girders holding up their makeshift workspace in the docks. She'd woken up to find Dorca gone, and an awful premonition had led her here.

The other woman sat with the portable balanced on one leg and her hands neatly in her lap. She looked up at Tessarn. Her gaze was maddeningly calm.

Tessarn shook her head. "You used it, didn't you? You went ahead and used it. She's barely five hours out and you used it and you got, what? One? Two of them? What the fuck does it matter if we get TWO of them, Dee? There are thousands! Probably millions on ice!"

"These are the two who saw the flickering light," she said. "You can't be too careful."

"Wh--" Tessarn broke off. "We went over this. She's not going to know it was more than a maintenance fault. We agreed we'd wait!" With a conscious effort, she tried to keep from shouting loud enough to wake the whole sector. "Until we could make some kind of demand, or... you know, achieve something. Or improve it. We've only got the station transmitter to work with, we could send it further, this is just a proof of concept--"

"And it works perfectly," said Tessarn's friend. She smiled. "You did very well, thank you. Now I know it can be done. And it's an intriguing idea. If we can selectively take them off the grid, make it impossible for them to communicate with the others, that has all sorts of possibilities."

"Dee, what's wrong? You don't sound like yourself." The cold air in the unheated chamber made Tessarn very aware that she was sweating. "What's all this about 'intriguing possibilities'? What about what they did to Piraeth? What about the movement? What about our plans, Dorca?"

"Oh, Tessarn. I'm precisely myself, I'm afraid. Unfortunately for you, that's just not who you thought it was." In a smooth motion, she lifted a gun from her lap. "The device will be invaluable, thank you. I'd normally do this kind of thing in-house, but some work is just too sensitive. There are a few changes I'd like to make, but I think I can see what's necessary." She took the portable in one hand and rose to her feet. The gun didn't even waver.

Tessarn stared stupidly at the gun. "Uh. Dorca?"

"I'm afraid not," said Anaander Mianaai. And fired.


End file.
